Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Themed Issue on “India and Travel Narratives” (Vol. 12, No. 3, 2020) Guest-edited by: Ms. Somdatta Mandal, PhD Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n3/v12n321.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.21 Writing Back Through Travel: A Study of The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan Arnab Chatterjee Assistant Professor of English, Harishchandrapur College, Pipla, Malda Email address: [email protected] Abstract Mirza Abu Taleb Khan who travelled to England from 1799-1802 is one of the early Indians who participated in what Michael Fisher calls ‘counterflows to colonialism’ and recorded his experience in the form of a travelogue. Taleb’s Travels foregrounds how a colonized subject from the periphery tries to understand and negotiate with the metropolitan centre that attempted to dominate and control the Other. It is pertinent to explore the cultural dialogue initiated by a ‘contact zone’ formed through the travel of an Indian. The oriental traveller who was both the gazer and the gazed, came up with a highly complex gaze that created a version of what Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘autoethnography’ and a space for ‘transculturation’. Taleb’s entry in print culture through writing a travelogue seems highly significant because he tried to write back a genre called travel writing that played an integral part in the consolidation of empire by mapping the cultural topography as well as the flora and fauna of the Other. The travel of the ‘Persian Prince in London’ problematized an important binary created by colonial discourse-- Britain’s mobility as opposed to the stasis of the Other. Though Taleb accepted some of the binaries created by the Orientalist discourse, there are areas where he refused to accept the superiority of the British culture. First published in 1810, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799-1803 brings out the dialectic of the acceptance and rejection of the dominant metropolitan culture. He admired the science and technology of Britain, their education system and law. He also sharply criticized the British as proud, insolent, intolerant, non-religious, luxurious and lazy and his criticism of British culture provides a strong sense of postcolonial resistance. He debunked the empirical codes of European travel writing by positing the worldview of the Other through the form of ‘safarnama’. This paper attempts to critically locate Taleb’s text as an ‘authoethnographic expression’ and the problematic position of an Indian traveller who can question empire and also serve the interest of empire by teaching oriental languages to the colonial masters. Keywords: contact zone, autoethnography, transculturation, colonial discourse, postcolonial resistance Postcolonial criticism has paid considerable attention to bring out how the European travel narratives played a significant role in the development of the process of the discursive production of knowledge and perception about non-European territories. It gradually extended its scope to include non-European travelogues in the wake of imperialism and a critical focus on the travellers from non-Western countries to the West has opened up new avenues in postcolonial thought as travel writing is much about imagining the other as about inscribing the self. Indian travellers created a body of knowledge about themselves and their homelands which often countered the British orientalist representations of Indians. This paper attempts to look at Abu Taleb’s The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799-1803 to critically engage with the Indian responses to the process of colonization, his direct self-representation in © AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected]. 175 Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2020 the British public sphere, and his negotiation with the complexities of identity fostered by colonialism. The British began to travel to India on a large scale during the late eighteenth century and their presence multiplied as the East India Company gradually shifted its focus from mere commerce and gradually evolved into an administrative body to plunder the wealth of India. The reversal of travel (from India to the West) is also discernible since the eighteenth century. Michael Fisher calls this phenomenon “counterflows to colonialism” and claims “by the mid nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Indian seamen, servants, scholars, soldiers, students, envoys, royalty, officials, merchants, tourists, and settlers had all journeyed to Britain” (Fisher, 1996, p. 1). Abu Taleb was not the first Indian traveller to embark on a journey from the periphery to the metropolitan centre. Taleb had many notable antecedents like Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin and Dean Mahomet who travelled to England also recorded their experience in the form of travelogue. Dean Mahomet’s Travels of Sake Deen Mahomed published in 1794 is the first written account in English by an Indian and an unprecedented entry into the print culture that proliferated during the Enlightenment. Unlike Mahomet, Taleb wrote his travelogue in Persian probably in 1805 for a domestic audience. It was translated into English by Charles Stewart, Professor of Oriental Languages at Haileybury College and was published in 1810 as The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799-1803Written by Himself in the Persian Language. The Persian text was brought out again in 1812 by the East India Company with an aim to have a favourable impression in the minds of the Indians. It is pertinent to note that initially Persian was the Company’s official language of administration and in 1837 the Company officials decided to switch over to English as the administrative language. Mirza I’tesamuddin went to England as a Persian diplomat in 1770 and formally offered tuitions in Persian and Taleb was known as the Persian prince in London and provided tuitions to more than twenty persons during his brief stay. One can clearly notice the politics of language as an essential tool to run colonial administration as knowledge of the Persian language would be conducive to draw the cultural map of India. It is important to note that in the eighteenth century all the Indian travellers were Muslim by religion as the traditional Hindus believed that crossing kalapani (blackwater) was a kind of sin. Abu Taleb started his European travels in 1799 at the invitation of Captain David Richardson, a Persian lexicographer. Though he was employed as a local revenue officer by the East India Company, his career underwent several phases of crisis and at the time of his travel he was in debt and the cost of travel was given by Captain Dermis. He wished to die during the journey to get delivered from the anxiety-riddled life. The journey on the ship shows that the colonial mindset of the British began to gain momentum. On the ship to Britain, Mirza’s cabin was separated only by a canvas partition from that of an Englishman called Mr. Grand. He recalled how he was abused rudely by the Englishman on a stormy night. In Europe Prabasir Patra(1881), Rabindranath Tagore underwent similar experience in his encounter with two obnoxious Englishmen whom he designated as “John Bull” (1881, p.8). The abuses of the Europeans during the journey clearly brought out their racist attitude to the Indians. Though in Cape Town Taleb found the Dutchmen as ‘low minded, inhospitable and cruel’, fortune smiled on him when he came to Ireland and earned the patronage of Colonel Babu. He arrived in England in 1799 and got a chance to meet Lord Cornwallis who in turn introduced him to the Queen and he became the Persian Prince. The first attempt of the Indians to write back to the English manifested in the form of travel writing. Though it was not an overtly declared nationalist discourse against the rhetoric of 176 Writing Back Through Travel: A Study of The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan colonialism, it created a platform for the emergent Indian nationalist self-fashioning. Taleb wrote his account of travel in Persian that could be transformed into English and the project of translation was primarily taken up to disseminate the wonders of the West to the East. Taleb’s Travels was not a naïve appropriation of Western travel writing. While the traveller repeatedly fell back upon his Muslim/Indian identity and began the travelogue with an invocation in the Islamic tradition, the “Translator’s Preface” highlighted the liberal curiosity of the traveller. It is important to quote Charles Stewart here: The free remarks of an intelligent foreigner, and especially of an Asiatic, on our laws, customs, and manners, when they are ascertained to be genuine, must always be considered as an object to liberal curiosity”( 1810/2005, p. xxxiii). The readings of Taleb’s Travels often try to locate it in the tradition of writings like Montesque’s Letters Persanes (1721). It is nearly contemporaneous with Elizabeth Hamilton’s novel Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) where we see the deployment of a fictional Indian traveller to England. Taleb’s text is different from that of Hamilton’s because an actual travel took place from India to England unlike the fictional travel in Hamilton’s novel. Hamilton provided a negative image of Islam and justified the British intervention on the ground of releasing the Hindus from the rapacious reign of the Muslim rulers.